State lawmakers urge delay in overhaul of NY home health aide program

State lawmakers urged health officials Tuesday to push back the April deadline to overhaul a program that provides Medicaid-funded personal assistants to more than 250,000 New Yorkers with disabilities — or at least establish a contingency plan to ensure no one loses services.

But state Health Commissioner Dr. James McDonald told state lawmakers at a joint Senate and Assembly hearing on the health budget that there was no need to diverge from the current plan because everything is going smoothly so far.

The personal assistants funded through the state’s $9 billion Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program help their clients with essential tasks like eating, going to the bathroom and getting dressed.

Thousands of home care consumers and aides have until April 1 to enroll with a new company the state has installed to run the program, which is replacing more than 600 existing intermediaries. Outreach began in January.

So far, 40,000 consumers have started the process of registering with the company, called PPL, and 22,000 have completed it, McDonald said at the hearing.

“If 22,000 have fully transitioned, that means 258,000 have not,” said Assemblymember Simcha Eichenstein of Brooklyn, expressing concerns about the pace of enrollment.

But McDonald said PPL is actually “ahead of the schedule they proposed to us.”

State Sen. Gustavo Rivera of the Bronx said that even though officials say everything is “hunky dory,” there still needs to be a plan to ensure uninterrupted services for those who don’t register with PPL by the deadline, whether it’s “just a couple hundred or a couple thousand.”

Amir Bassiri, the state Medicaid director, said it would be up to the organizations that operate the state’s Medicaid plans to ensure their members don’t fall through the cracks.

“Today, the health plan is accountable for that member and after April 1, the health plan is accountable for that member,” Bassiri said. “That doesn’t change as part of this transition.”

In a testimony the New York Health Plan Association submitted for the hearing, the advocacy group for health insurers noted that the transition was happening in “an extremely short timeframe” and said it was concerned about “avoiding any disruption” of care.

“Plans are making every effort to work collaboratively with the state and PPL to assure that members continue to receive their [Consumer Directed Personal Assistance] services as the implementation date gets closer and expect to continue to work with the state and PPL once the implementation is underway,” the group said in the submitted testimony.

New York health officials are defending the plan to overhaul the Consumer Directed Personal Assistance Program as Gov. Kathy Hochul calls for an investigation into the project's most vocal critics. A group called the Alliance to Protect Home care spent more than $10 million last year on its campaign against the changes, but it’s unclear exactly who donated to the campaign.

Companies that are being pushed out of the program have also filed multiple lawsuits against the state challenging the transition plan.